Life Among the Distant Stars
by Luna Lovegood5
Summary: A fic dealing with the first twelve weeks of the Doctor and Rose's new life after the end of series four.


**Life Among the Distant Stars: A Ten II x Rose Fanmix**

**A/N:** This was originally posted on LiveJournal as a fanmix. I've left the song titles and lyrics in as they bind all the sections together, so if you'd like to download the songs, just go to my livejournal and you'll find a link there. My username is hippiebanana132.  
**Disclaimer:** I own neither the characters nor the songs used in this fic.

**The End: ****Lucie Silvas – Forget Me Not** (1) [Time Lord Doctor]

_Forget me not, I ask of you,  
__Wherever your life takes you to.  
__And if we never meet again,  
__Think of me every now and then._

Even though he knows he's giving her everything she ever wanted, he can't help but feel he's taking something away from the both of them.

One day, when she's waiting for a train and fiddling with the gold band around her fourth finger, or sitting windswept as her children splash in the sea, he hopes she'll remember the man who gave up so much to get her there.

**The Beginning:**** Nerina Pallot – My Last Tango** (2)

_My mouth will not speak,  
__I'm weary and weak,  
__And I only wanted to see you again.  
__If that's unfair, just let me know.  
__Just write it down, and then I'll go._

This is the fourteenth time she's checked her watch in the last seventeen minutes.

Both facing sternly forwards, they sit, not quite together, at the end of a tiny bed in a tiny, damp room, the first shelter they had come across in their long walk from the beach. Through paper-thin walls, they can hear Jackie bustling around in the room next door.

Rose checks her watch again. Hovering between anxiety to leave this awkward room and fear of starting this new life, she can't decide whether she is more relieved or nervous that they have ticked a whole minute closer to Pete's arrival time.

A Zeppelin engine whirs overhead. Only he looks up. Neither of them say anything.

Frustrated when, at nineteen minutes in, she raises her watch to her eyes once more, the Doctor firmly grasps her wrist, stilling its progress.

"If he's on time," he says simply, "He'll be here in... ooh, four hours, seven minutes and twenty-two seconds. Twenty-one. And a bit."

She stares down at his fingers around her wrist for a long moment before looking up at him with blurry eyes. "You talk just like him," she says, voice breaking slightly. She coughs awkwardly.

"I am him," the Doctor reminds her softly.

She presses her lips together and lowers her head. It's almost a nod. When she speaks, her voice is higher than usual, cautious and barely audible.

"Yeah. Yeah, I know."

His fingers are still tight about her wrist.

Rose stands up suddenly, tugging her wrist away and striding towards the window. Her hands clutch at the sill, fingertips whitening. She turns, shaking her hair out of her eyes, and there's a blazing, determined look on her face.

"Didn't he want me? Was that it? You've moved on, you've found better people. He didn't want some stupid, jeopardy-friendly kid tagging along anymore, and he didn't want you, so he just _left _us here."

He knows Rose Tyler better than she realises, and too well to be hurt by her dismissal of his affection for her. Despite the shake of her hands and the accusation in her voice, he is encouraged by her use of _you_. He stands and walks over to her, holding her by the tops of her arms. "Rose – "

The gesture is too familiar. She shakes him off, turning back to the window with her head in her hands. "I can't – I don't – "

The Doctor takes a step back, waiting patiently. Despite her older eyes, full of stories of tragedies and mistakes in universe after universe, despite the dust of a thousand wars that has settled on her shoulders, when she turns back to him, she is a lost little girl of nineteen all over again, her voice hitching in that way he knows too well. "Didn't you want me to come back?"

He steps forward again, fingers sliding against her damp cheeks as he takes her face in his hands. "Rose Tyler, I searched for you for over a year. Every minute I could, I fought to find a way to get back to you, even after I knew my best hope was a few sentences, nothing more than a hologram across the Void. And if I hadn't found that tiny crack between our universes, I'd still be searching today."

It's easier to keep arguing than to try and believe this all-new, too-honest version of the man she had loved for so very long. "Then why – " The Doctor goes to interrupt her, but she cuts back across him, changing tack and losing all her fight as she processes what he's said. "I thought... if he left me here, if he left us here, then he didn't want me. And if he didn't, then you..."

It's in that moment that the Doctor knows, however human he might be now, he will never be good with words. Actions have always been more his thing.

When Jackie walks in seconds later, they spring guiltily apart and she laughs. "Nothing I haven't seen before. Your dad just rang," she tells a blushing Rose, nodding to the wall that joins their rooms. The Doctor scratches his neck awkwardly. "Says he got a lift in some fancy new Zeppelin thing. Sonic or something, I don't know. Anyway, he'll be in here in an hour, so mind you're both ready." She stares at them significantly, making eyes at their joined hands, and backs out of the room, shutting the door behind her. "And no funny business, I can hear everything through these walls!"

The door rattles as the sound of Jackie's own door shutting reverberates through the whole hotel. It's Rose who starts laughing first.

_You skate around my human skin,  
__Your name is where my heart begins.  
__Just tell the stars to give a sign...  
__Put it in a bottle, say you're mine._

**Week Two: ****Catherine Feeny – Touch Back Down** (3)

_You can't tell the truth,  
__Not even to yourself.  
__It hurts too much to admit that it's in there.  
__You can lie and dissemble with anyone else,  
__But I know you like I know myself._

"_Does it need saying?"_

Sometimes, when she sits curled up on the large windowsill of her room and stares out at the night sky, the oh-so-familiar stranger tangled in the sheets of her bed, she can't help but wonder if that was a dismissal. There are moments in the early days, more frequent than she'd like to admit, when she wishes she hadn't asked at all. She should have known he'd never say it.

**Week Two: OneRepublic – Stop and Stare** (4)

_You start to wonder why you're here not there  
__And you'd do anything to get what's fair,  
__But fair ain't what you really need._

She doesn't understand. He hid the truth away, wrapped it up as a task and a mission and an exile he'd entrusted to her, but one day she'll see what he's given her – what he's given up. This is no punishment or excuse, this ending isn't because he wanted to get rid of her and didn't quite know how else to do it. This is because he loves her more than he will ever be able to say, because he knows what's best for her – and she will never admit it, but she needs someone to love her as much as he needs someone to fix him.

This is his gift to her. A second chance, for both of them, because that's the sort of man he is. The life and the love she has always wanted and he has never before been able to give.

He took away their history and left her his heart.

**Week Three: ****Delta Goodrem – Fragile** (5)

_Six thoughts at once,  
__I can't focus on one.  
__[...] __Sometimes I feel like I'm alone,  
__Sometimes I feel like I'm not that strong._

It shouldn't be so hard to let herself love him. It's like he said – he thinks like the Doctor, he looks like the Doctor. Same memories, same thoughts, same everything. Why, then, does she have to look away whenever he meets her eyes for too long? Why is she scared of finding something there that's just a little too familiar? Why does she drop his fingers in burning guilt every other time he takes her hand? The questions keep coming, the doubts keep rising, and every time he thinks they've taken a step forward, she falls even further back.

He can't understand her fear, greater than it ever was before, that one day he'll just up and leave. Thinking she's pre-empting the inevitable, she keeps telling him to go, telling him that it's alright if he wants to. That he doesn't, _shouldn't _want to be stuck here, that the only thing he's ever belonged to is the stars. She's got the Doctor back, sort of, but it's not the way she thought it would be and she's never felt so alone.

He rapidly finds that kissing her and walking out on her are his two best methods of shutting her up.

**Week Three: ****Snow Patrol – It's Beginning To Get To Me** (6)

_And it's beginning to get to me  
__That I know more of the stars and sea  
__Than I do of what's in your head,  
__Barely touching in our cold bed._

He doesn't understand why she finds it so hard.

She's treating him like he's the Doctor, like he still wants to be out there, alone. He's remotely grateful for that, most days. Afterall, he _is _the Doctor. What she can't seem to grasp is that he's a Doctor with more chances and opportunities than have ever befallen him before. For him, this is a life a part of him has always longed to taste. To her, this is his exile, and she has never wanted to be his jailer.

_I chose this_, he tells her, again and again, so much conviction in his voice that even if he hadn't been sure of his choice, he would be by now.

She doesn't believe him.

**Week Four: S****avage Garden – Hold Me** (7)

_If we can't find a way out of these problems,  
__Then maybe we don't need this.  
__I might need you to hold me tonight,  
__I might need you to say it's alright.  
__I might need you to take the first stand  
__Because tonight I'm finding it hard to be your man._

He has his moments of doubt, far more frequently than he'd like to admit. He wonders, too often, if they're doing the right thing. Who is he kidding? He's a Time Lord, albeit only half now, living a normal life day by day with washing and working and watching the television. He lives in a house – a big house, certainly, but a house all the same, with walls and carpets and a garden. And _windows._

"Why didn't he say goodbye?"

Sometimes he thinks he's not cut out for this. This is one of those times.

"Rose," he begins, forcing down his bitter amusement and impatience, "I'd've thought that was obvious." Afterall, the two of them were rather busy at the time. What was the other Doctor supposed to do, stand around on that beach waiting for them to finish just to deliver a word he has never really been able to say?

The same thought is clearly crossing her mind. "He's gonna be so lonely, out there all on his own. I should never've – "

_Kissed you. Chosen you. Let him go. _He knows what's coming next and he doesn't want to hear it. He pushes up out of his armchair and heads swiftly for the door.

Rose beats him to it, standing in the doorway, fearful as ever of him leaving. "Look, I didn't mean it like that, I don't mean I don't want you here, I just – " He's still trying to edge around her, out of the room, staring her down with a face full of thunder. She stands her ground, immediately pulling her defences up at the look on his face. Her arms fold across her chest. "Just once, can we have this conversation without you runnin' away?!"

The Doctor takes a few steps backwards. "Do you think you're the only one who's felt lost these past weeks?" His voice is too calm, too quiet, betrayed by his fingers twitching into fists and the constant step-stepping of his feet, back and forth, back and forth, never moving more than a full step ahead or behind. "Do you think you're the only who's finding this difficult?"

Rose opens her mouth to protest, but he cuts across her.

"No, Rose. You don't understand, you can't see. You lost a man who ... who cared for you so much that he gave you up so I could make you happier than he believed he ever could. I've lost my whole life, Rose. The TARDIS, travelling, the chance to run away when everything became too much – even the stars are different here. Everything I've ever known is gone – apart from you."

_And you've changed_ hangs in the air between them. Sometimes, it feels like he's in constant competition with the man from which he came, barely allowed to touch her without sparking off memories of him or filling her with guilt. It's unfair of him to imply that she is only concerned with her own misery and losses – after all, she's sat with him night after night, holding him, listening, watching their TARDIS grow. She knows what it's like to land here and for everything to feel wrong. She's not forgotten. But ninety-nine percent of the time, it feels as though all the effort between them is going towards her accepting him when he still hasn't accepted this universe. One day she'll only spare him two words, the next she'll drag him, laughing, out of work for a picnic or a sunset or no real reason at all, the next she'll be back to confused distance, and it's driving him mad. He doesn't know what she wants or what to offer her, and some days he just isn't quite enough of the Doctor to even give her comfort or reassurance. He doesn't _have_ to be here, and some days he wonders exactly why he is. It's a long way from the domestic bliss he naively thought it would be.

His Torchwood colleagues make lewd jokes about shagging the boss' daughter but they have no idea. In the month they have been here, the Doctor and Rose have shared a bed every single night. Everyone assumes that they're a couple in every sense of the word, handily forgetting – or not knowing – that it took the two of them a year to even kiss when they first met. Here, he is afraid and she is distant, and neither of them want to push it. Five days was enough to fall in love in their old life, but now? Now he's not sure that five months would be enough, and he has so much less time than before. He finds this sense of urgency hanging over everything hard to handle, by turns pushing him into action and shying him away from danger. And still, even with the clock ticking away in the background, they are yet to fully embark on the kind of the life the other Doctor had intended for them when he left this universe behind. Talk of families, children, growing old together – even mortgages – is a long way off.

He doesn't realise that he's been shouting the worst of this until the sudden, ringing silence lets him know he's stopped. Donna's influence has clearly rubbed off on him. Rose stands before him, red-faced and closed-off, her own voice carefully controlled as she steps sideways out of the door and into the room, leaving his path free.

"Yeah?" she says, backing further away from the open door. "Well if you hate being here that much then maybe you should just go."

Through the space she has left, he can see the kitchen staff gathered in the dining room doorway, staring.

"Go on!" she tells him, bordering on hysterical, pointing at the door as he pulls at his hair in utter frustration. "Leave! We both know you want to."

To her complete bewilderment, the Doctor shakes his head and laughs, albeit hollowly, staring down at the carpet. "Nothing changes," he says, looking back up.

Rose folds her arms again, defensive. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I've never had arguments like this with anyone else in my whole life."

"Great," she mutters, but the corners of her mouth twitch and he can tell she's mellowed. There's a very long silence before she swallows her pride and speaks again. "Look at us." She makes a noise somewhere between a laugh, a sniff and a snort. "Can't even argue properly."

He looks at her then, really looks at her, standing there a metre away from the doorway with her hands hanging loosely at her sides, mascara a mess, cheeks still red, and he remembers all that she's done for him, all the gentle words and patient looks, night after night after night, and he realises how she can feel so alone – how one-sided she probably feels this relationship is, too. This woman, it occurs to him, travelled across universes to find him, seeing things so horrific she can't even voice them to a man who murdered his entire race. He gave up everything to be here and live this ideal, both of his selves making an enormous sacrifice – his life and her love – and still they stand here shouting for all the house to hear, unable to see each other's point of view.

So much has been said. Too much, perhaps. But maybe, if they go about this the right way, if he doesn't walk out and she stops asking _what if_, maybe they can turn a corner here tonight.

"I'm sorry," Rose says, quietly ashamed. "I never think, I just... keep goin' on about him and you're right there and – "

He chose this life. He wanted it, and he will try bloody hard to keep it, especially while part of him is still out there longing for it.

He grins. "Has anyone ever told you that you sound like Jackie when you shout?"

**Week Five: ****The Corrs – Hurt Before** (8)

_Take it in stride,  
You're just twenty-five,_  
_And you know we've all been hurt before._

Days go by and things get better. He wants to tell her he's coping, that their TARDIS is growing and one day soon it'll be just like old times (or maybe even better, perhaps, if they're lucky). He wants to tell her that all he wants now is for her to accept him, but saying _I love you _was one giant leap on a path of many steps. He still finds it difficult to voice things sometimes and he can't lie. He aches for their old life, right through to his bones.

For her part, she feels like she's only just beginning to acknowledge how out of place he is here – how much he has left behind. For a man who has travelled for more than five hundred years to tie himself to one place, one _person_ – she can't imagine how that must feel.

They lie cocooned in her bed, the aftermath of their argument still hanging over them, and she's desperately trying to find the words to make amends for her selfishness.

"I'm so sorry," she whispers, so choked and quiet that he deciphers the words more through the air pressure on his cheek than the sound in his ear. "I really am."

He turns his head towards her, preparing to struggle with his words, but her lips are on his before he has the chance. She is gentle and undemanding, too shy and wary to let it continue for long – afterall, despite their shared sheets this is the first time since Bad Wolf Bay that she has moved first and too much time has elapsed for this to be easy.

**Week Six:**** Delta Goodrem – ****Will You Fall For Me?** (9)

_I'm not acting like myself  
And I'm playing the role of someone else.  
Am I wrong to think that something could happen?_

She sits over him, tracing invisible lines down his arms with her fingertips. His skin is newer, softer, but not as alien as she expected. "You've still got the same scars," she frowns, rolling off to lie next to him and scatter gentle kisses along the stitch-marks blemishing his collarbone.

He wriggles. "That tickles," he protests – so, naturally, she continues with increased vigour until he's forced to bat her off with a pillow and pin her down. All this is so new to him. She is often wary as though it's new for her, too, but he knows that is only because of who he is. For him, every display of affection is a long-forgotten dance, and he's not sure if he remembers the steps.

It's funny, he thinks, watching her drift off with pillow-feathers in her hair and smile on her face, but he thinks he's fallen in love all over again.

They've certainly turned that corner, but whether or not she can love him like she loved, still loves, her original Doctor – especially with a relationship so different – is yet to be seen.

**Week Seven: Katie ****Melua – It's All In My Head** (10)

_Every night you whisper to me,  
_"_This always will be."  
__Every night you smooth down my hair,  
__But you're not really there._

Once those first few difficult weeks had passed, she thought it would be easy, but his touch burns in a way it never used to.

Most days she thinks she's found her feet. Most days she knows they'll be alright. But sometimes, just sometimes when she's half asleep, his skin is rougher, covered in original lines and scars and marks containing the universe. Sometimes he smells different, and the suit jacket hanging on the back of the door is brown.

When she wakes up and looks at him like he's a stranger, he knows. He always knows.

**Week Seven: Goo Goo Dolls – Iris** (11)

_When everything's made to be broken,  
__I just want you to know who I am._

She turns over and cuddles into him absently, running a hand up his arm. He puts a hand out to grab hers, stop her wandering fingers before they reach his singular heart.

She frowns sleepily, eyes still closed, and curls her fingers around his. "Doctor?"

He only hesitates for a second. "I'm here."

Rose is the only one who returns to sleep that night.

**Week Eight: KT Tunsta****ll – Heal Over** (12)

_And I don't wanna hear you tell yourself  
__That these feelings are in the past.  
__You know it doesn't mean they're off the shelf.  
__Everybody sails alone,  
__But we can travel side by side…_

"Daddy," Tony asks one day, as they sit around a too-big table in the too-big Tyler mansion, eating Sunday lunch, "Is Rose going away again, Daddy?"

Pete's paid for a holiday for them both, a round-the-world trip to land them anywhere they want. He says they need it, won't take no for an answer. Their single suitcase stands in the hall, unforgivably shiny and new, just waiting to be covered in the dust of a hundred new worlds.

_You haven't seen it yet, remember? _Rose had told him late one night when he'd expressed reluctance towards the whole idea. He wasn't sure how he'd get on with travelling like a proper tourist. She'd kissed his eyelids and laughed. _Not with these eyes._

At the table, Jackie shushes her son before Pete has time to finish chewing his vegetables and answer. "Not like last time, sweetheart. She's just going on holiday, like when we went to the beach, remember? She's coming back." And she fixes Rose with a glare that clearly says _you'd better._

There's an easy silence while everyone chews until Tony pipes up again, this time addressing Rose. "Are you goin' to the special beach? I don't like it when you go an' see the special beach. You come back sad and you never play."

The Doctor privately thinks that everyone else finishes quickly on purpose, because in ten minutes he and Rose are left to finish their carrots alone.

He lets his fork drop to his plate with a clatter. "You used to visit – "

"Every year," she interrupts, looking down at her plate and concentrating a little too diligently on her food. She clearly wants this conversation to be over as quickly as possible, but this isn't about competition or jealousy. He is still the man who lost her to this world, and it is his heart that aches to think of her returning to that beach, year after year, in the vain hope that he might return to her before she fought her way back to him.

He lifts her fingers from her fork and pulls them into his own, tugging gently on her hand when she still doesn't look up. "Were you waiting?"

"No. Yeah. I dunno," she stumbles, looking up briefly before turning her eyes away and shaking her head, more in an effort to clear it than as a denial.

Time might run differently in this universe, but he knows it's coming up to another year. "Do you want to go again?"

"No," she says, too quickly, snatching her fingers back and rubbing her hands together awkwardly in her lap. "No," she repeats, quietly. "Got you here, haven't I? And he's... he's..."

Not coming back anymore. No, he's not.

The Doctor studies the dark mahogany dining table for a long moment before speaking again. "Do you still – ?" He sees her reflection blink in the table and raises his eyes. She thinks she knows what he's asking but she won't risk a reply without being sure. He sighs and forces himself to say it, not quite recognising the words as they come out of his mouth. "You still love him."

Almost defensively, as though daring him to tell her not to, that she can't, that she shouldn't, she answers exactly as he feared she would. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."

He has always known that there are – and always will be – three people in this relationship. Considering the third person is, well, himself, and as long as one day Rose will belong fully to the here and now rather than the _what if_s of the past, perhaps that is something he will just have to accept.

"I'm always gonna love him," she says, carefully, shyly, " 'cause he gave me you."

Perhaps it's not going to be so hard to accept afterall.

**Week Nine: D****arren Hayes – So Beautiful** (13)

_You know they can have their universe;  
__We'll be in the dirt designing stars._

Somehow, somewhere along the line, supermarkets and babies and nine-to-five stopped being more terrifying than the Daleks.

Realising this one morning while brushing his teeth, he looks at himself in the mirror and laughs until he gets toothpaste all down his tie and Rose has to dig him out another one from the pile of washing for the day.

The TARDIS has grown since they've been away, the change more obvious when they haven't been around to check her hour by hour. There's a soft hum emanating from the garage as he walks past, new tie in place, making his way towards central London and three reported sightings of giant talking shrimps.

Perhaps he's a little bit crazy, but he wouldn't change this for the world.

**Week Nine: Lucie Silvas – Breathe In** (14)

_Wipe the dust from your sweet smile,  
__And breathe in life._

They stopped the shrimps.

For a long moment, they simply stand there in the street, stunned and disbelieving, until reality sinks in and they begin laughing like maniacs. Real laughter, full of adventure, the kind she's been waiting to hear from him for so long, and he's spinning her around and around just like old times. There's a gooey medley of exploded seafood in his hair, but his lips taste the same and for once she's not looking for the differences. This moment is theirs.

He's been waiting for her to kiss him without sadness since the day they met.

He has this feeling that as long as they keep going, they'll be OK.

**Week Ten: The Feeling – Kettle's On** (15) [Time Lord Doctor]

_I'm hoping you remember what I taught you,  
__Hoping you remember me at all._

Their mutual Time Lord connection isn't exactly what he'd call specific. Whether his counterpart is spending an evening naming the new constellations for Rose, or yelling as she splashes him with humanly cold water in the English sea, or getting up early to fetch the Sunday paper before she's awake, he does not know. What he can feel, even a universe away, is their happiness. It's tentative, certainly, but a certain kind of peace is developing where before he had only felt the sharp rebuke of a guarded heart and cautious mind.

There are frequent, teasing glimpses of emotions in which he can never partake, and besides that, felt for and by a woman he has lost through his own design and who he will never quite be able to leave behind – certainly not in this body. These hands, this skin, both his hearts, they all belong to her. He died for her, reborn with a share of her enthusiasm for life, infected with her hope and love and compassion. She even gave him her accent. Rose Tyler near enough created the Doctor. As long as this incarnation lives, he will carry part of her with him, and try as he might, he can't let that go. He's scared of who he might become if he does.

_You made me better._

But he's not better. Not really. He accused her Doctor of genocide, but only hours after he had lost Rose, he himself had murdered the Racnoss. He can move on, now, in a way he never used to – walk away from tragedy as though one more knock can't hurt him anymore. He has almost always lost more, faced worse. Done worse. But at night, when he wakes screaming with no-one beside him, and often in the day, when he sees something that makes him remember all he has lost and all he is responsible for, he is not quite the healed man he was when he was with her.

He won't deny it. He wants her back. Maybe he even needs her still.

The temptation to peek into their life is strong, but he never looks back. He doesn't dare. Davros was right. He leaves his mind open, though, ever-receptive to the roaring silence out there in the vain hope that perhaps one day more of his own kind will emerge, and sometimes emotions trickle through. He likes to check up on them in this way from time to time, make sure they're both OK. Likes to feel as though, somehow, he's not alone, not the last anymore.

He'd like to know, just for one day, how it feels to love Rose Tyler with a human heart.

**Week Eleven: ****Natalie Imbruglia – Honeycomb Child** (16)

_I got all those shells  
__And put them in a box.  
__How far would you go  
__If I didn't want to stop?_

He'd thought, until now, that the day was a perfectly ordinary one.

He'd spent the morning having a chat with the friendly, largely misunderstood Ablebrox Beetles who had somehow teleported themselves into several capsules of the London Eye in the height of the tourist season. Lunchtime was dedicated to enlightening them on the better dung-heaps of the universe and the afternoon spent shuffling the relevant paperwork onto someone else as he watched them fly back home.

No, all in all, it's been an entirely regular day. That is, until he returns home to find Rose at the windowsill in her bedroom, carefully putting something he can't see into what looks like an ornate jewellery box.

She turns around when he enters, almost dropping the tiny objects in her hands. Her hair is full of the wind and there's a broken-up, tell-tale mascara trail staining her left cheek.

"I just wanted to say goodbye," she tells him, voice hitching slightly, rubbing the items in her hands nervously. It's not until she drops one that he realises what they are and where she has been.

Shells.

They've lined the windowsill ever since he got here, but he's never questioned what they were, where they came from. He should have known, really.

Today must have been the end of another year.

Wordlessly, he walks over and picks up the shell from the carpet, placing it on the windowsill where it belongs. But Rose takes it back again and puts it in the box, dropping the others in too, one by one, never saying a word. Finally, she reaches into the neck of her tshirt and pulls out a long chain with a too-familiar key at the end, placing it in the box without looking at him. She closes the lid, takes a breath and turns around.

"I'm sorry. I had to go, just one last time. I wasn't waiting, I just..." Tears start to roll down her cheeks and he can see it all too clearly, her standing there with her feet sinking into the sand, the water on her cheeks as salty as the sea lapping at her toes as she says her goodbyes. When he drops his eyes, her knees are muddy, sandy, just as he expected.

"Why did you stay?" she asks, drawing his eyes back up. "You could've gone with him. You could've, I dunno, nicked his TARDIS, run off with that bit of coral, gone travelling on your own. Why did you stay with me?"

_Because I love you._

Unwilling to stutter his way through an unsatisfactory explanation, he says nothing. The answer to that question is one he will never truly be able to put into words, because there are none – human or otherwise – that can sufficiently express the hold this once insignificant little shop girl has over his heart.

"Rose," he tries, almost laughing, "If you really don't know the answer to that, then I don't know why you've let me stay here with you for so long."

Her cheeks stain ever so slightly pink. She dusts the sand from her palms and takes his fingers up in hers, swinging their hands in the space between their bodies. "D'you mind, that I went today?" she asks anxiously, chewing on her bottom lip. He stays silent, not entirely sure whether he minds or not. After all, it is him that she's visiting, year after year, in a way. "I'm not gonna go again, not if you don't want me to."

No matter what they've been through and how much they've both changed, the Doctor knows Rose Tyler, and he knows that no-one on Earth could stop her going to that beach if that's what she really wanted. He has no doubt that Jackie's tried to do exactly that every year without success. It's almost as if she's asking him to make her stop, asking him (as he is the nearest thing to the man she is so close to leaving behind, shutting away in that box with all her trinkets) to tell her that it's alright to move on now. That the other Doctor won't resent her for it.

Choosing his words carefully, aiming for a middle ground, he says, "Go any time you need to," hoping, almost knowing, that she won't need to anymore. He refuses to ban her from going to Norway – she's a free person and she can do what she likes. He doesn't own her. The whole notion is ridiculous to him. No, he's not going to stop her from returning there, one day, if she ever needs to. Afterall, he still wakes up almost every night and climbs onto the roof to stare at the stars. No, he's just going to put faith in the idea that perhaps she won't _want _to go back now.

"Well, that's the thing, isn't it?" She drops one of his hands and trails her free fingers up his arm, tiptoeing up to press her lips to his. "'Cause I sort of reckon," she whispers, barely pulling back – he can feel the words across his lips, "I sort of reckon that I don't need to anymore."

She traces kisses along his jaw and down, reaching his collar before he realises that her fingers have moved to the knot of his tie, the buttons of his shirt, the hem of her top.

He swallows, the air suddenly tight in his lungs. It's him, completely him that she's seeing. And this time, she doesn't pull away.

**Week Eleven: ****Maroon 5 – She Will Be Loved** (17)

_She always belonged to someone else.  
[...] I know I tend to get so insecure,  
It doesn't matter anymore.  
[…] It's compromise that moves us along._

He doesn't say it, the first time. They've both reverted to old ways since they left that beach, finding certain things near impossible to voice. Instead, she finds the words scrawled across a tiny scrap of paper that falls out of his jacket pocket as she folds it away. It's faded and crumpled from the wash, but she can make the words out enough to know what he's been trying to say. It's there, in four or five different languages, French and Welsh, she thinks, and maybe something alien next to the swirls and clockwork she recognises as his own tongue.

Three words, every single time.

**Week Twelve: T****he Corrs – Humdrum** (18)

_I wanna take you for granted –  
__Drift while you're talking,  
__Bathe while you're downstairs  
__And chat on the phone.  
__Fall asleep before bedtime,  
__Pass in the hallway,  
__Forget your birthday,  
__And shrink all your clothes._

If this is what he's been missing all these years, he thinks, early morning tea steaming on his desk, Rose's arms looped loosely around his neck, smiling into his mouth between him and the wall, then he wonders why on Earth he didn't get around to it sooner.

She tugs on his tie, turning him around so that he's against the wall and she can wriggle away. "I reckon," she says, as stern and prim and proper as she can manage, "That it's about time you got to work. I know for a fact that you've got eight reports to file today, Mr Smith."

"Oh, do I have to?" He hangs onto her hand, trailing after her like a plaintive puppy dog as she makes her way to the door.

"Yes, or I'll tell Mum that it was you who broke the tap in the kitchen last week."

The Doctor's eyes go wide, his mind racing through the various ways in which Jackie Tyler would be prepared to murder him. Not stabbing. That's too messy. But he doesn't think she's beyond slapping him to death. "You wouldn't!"

"I would." She tugs her hand from his, using her now-free index finger to point at him sternly. "Now get to it!"

"Oi, you have work too," he reminds her. "What about that translation system you're supposed to be working on, hm?"

She's almost at the doorway, her back to him. He strides over, grabs her by the elbow and spins her around. "Are you going without saying goodbye, Rose Tyler? That's rude."

She tugs him down by his tie. "Get," she says, punctuating each word with a quick kiss, "To – work. Or – else. Mmf!" she protests, as he grabs her by the waist and pulls her back for a longer kiss. For a second, she curves into him, sighing in the back of her throat, before pulling away, whipping around and walking straight into the poor startled tea boy and squeaking in fright.

"Sorry, Ianto!" she gabbles, backing out into the corridor. "Don't tell my Dad!"

The Doctor is left to grin sheepishly, blushing as he straightens out his tie. "No, really," he adds. "Don't tell her father."

**Happily Ever After: ****Gregory and the Hawk – Boats & Birds** (19)

_But you could skyrocket away from me  
__And never come back if you find another galaxy  
__Far from here, with more room to fly._

Underneath it all, behind all the guns and blue suits and growing up, they're still the same people. She still has the same insecurities, is still worried that one day he'll up and leave her because the idea of houses and children and jobs – even jobs chasing aliens – will get too stifling. The Earth isn't big enough for him, it never has been, and now she's finally accepted him she spends half her time watching him for signs of restlessness or wanderlust, desperate to hang onto him and make up for all these weeks she hasn't been able to appreciate what was right in front of her.

Feeling as though they're living on borrowed time and terrified of waking up and finding nothing but an empty bed and a few missing pieces of technology at work, she considers it almost inevitable that he will eventually leave.

One day, standing making tea in the kitchen, she stirs the milk in his cup and asks him – seriously, this time, uncertain of his answer in a way he never doubted hers – "How long are you gonna stay with me?"

**Catherine Feeny – Forever** (20)

_I can say without fail that love has been fleeting,  
__But I know you don't want the truth  
__So I'll say forever._

He can't give her the perfect, journeying, never-ending fairytale she's wanted ever since she met the Doctor, the two of them standing hand-in-hand at the edge of the universe for the rest of time. They will age, both of them, and die as all humans do.

As far as he's concerned, though, the rest of time doesn't have to stretch on into eternity. It can be here and now, the rest of _their _time, fighting countless aliens, growing their TARDIS, raising their children and spending every last year of his life with the woman for whom he gave up the stars.

So, just for now, he abandons his purist sense of time and tells her _forever._

He knew he was going to lie before she'd even finished asking the question. But something in the slowing beat of his heart says that maybe, just maybe, this time it's true.

_To tell you the end of the tale would be cheating._


End file.
